Lovecraftian Audios

If you’re looking for Lovecraft audios, you’re in the right place!

Readers of this website know that I have a large Lovecraft audio collection, and as time permits, I post them to this website. From now on, every audio I upload will also be listed below. My goal is for this webpage to be the definitive source for free Lovecraft audios on the web. (And no, not everything I have is here yet — it takes time — but if you sign up for email updates, you’ll know when I post new Lovecraftian audios. Sign up at the top right of this page.)

Lovecraft audio stories are straight-up readings of his fiction. Most of these are high quality recordings done by excellent readers.

Lovecraft audio dramas are stories by H.P. Lovecraft that have been converted into audio plays (aka audio drama). An audio drama is different from an audio book; an audio drama has different actors for each character in the story, it has sound effects, music, etc. One company calls audio drama “a movie in your mind”, and that’s a great way to think of it.

Lovecraft-influenced audios are (for the purposes of this website) stories based on Lovecraftian themes, but not by H.P. Lovecraft himself. You will find both audio stories and audio dramas in this category.

Lovecraft non-fiction audios are essays, biographies, and anything else to do with Lovecraft that is not a story.

NOTE: This Lovecraft Audio page will be updated frequently. If you want to be notified when I post new audios, then please do one or all of the following:

(I have taken care to not offer anything for free that is a product for sale and to give creators their due; however, if you see an audio here that you created, and you do not want it here, or want credit, please let me know by emailing me at lovecraftezine@gmail.com. My goal with this webpage is simply to provide a service to my fellow Lovecraftians.)

Last, it’s important to note that most links below will lead to my online collection, but a few links will lead to other websites. All Lovecraft audios are free unless otherwise indicated.

Without further ado, here are the Lovecraft audios!

LOVECRAFT AUDIO STORIES

At the Mountains of Madness – [free to listen at Spoken World Audio: At the Mountains of Madness] I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic – with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain…

Call of Cthulhu, The – [free download: The Call of Cthulhu, part 1 –The Call of Cthulhu, part 2]The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age…

Colour Out of Space, The – [free download from archive.org, The Colour Out of Space] A good reading. West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs…

Beyond the Wall of Sleep – [free download: Beyond the Wall of Sleep] I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier…

Dagon – [free download: Dagon] I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death…

Haunter of the Dark, The – [free download: The Haunter of the Dark] Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions…

Horror at Red Hook, The – [free download: The Horror at Red Hook] To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had fur him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley’s best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape…

Hound, The – [free download: The Hound, part 1 – The Hound, part 2] In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream – it is not, I fear, even madness – for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation…

Lurking Fear, The – [free download: The Lurking Fear, part 1 – The Lurking Fear, part 2] There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life…

Music of Erich Zann, The – [free download: The Music of Erich Zann] I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann… (Original recording by Yog-Sothoth)

Nameless City, The – [free download: The Nameless City] When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see…

Night Ocean, The – [free download: Download THE NIGHT OCEAN, part 1 – Download THE NIGHT OCEAN, part 2 – Download THE NIGHT OCEAN, part 3 – Download THE NIGHT OCEAN, part 4 – Download THE NIGHT OCEAN, part 5] The Night Ocean is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, so I asked The Lovecraft eZine audio talent if any of them would mind recording it for me. Justin Zimmer was kind enough to record it, and I want to share it with all of you. Justin has a great voice, and it’s a nice quality recording: In those days my mind was a place of shadowed cliffs and dark moving figures, like the ancient unsuspected realm which the fairy-tale recalled to me. I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing…

Picture in the House, The – [free download from The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, The Picture in the House] Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous…

Rats In the Walls, The – [free download: The Rats In the Walls part 1 – The Rats In the Walls part 2, and a free download from THE BLACK MASS on archive.org] On 16 July 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors, I let no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants…

Shadow Over Innsmouth, The – [free listen, play Youtube video below] Nothing that I could have imagined—nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way—would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw—or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

Thing On the Doorstep, The – [free download: The Thing On the Doorstep, part 1 – The Thing On the Doorstep, part 2]It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman–madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror–that thing on the doorstep…

LOVECRAFT AUDIO DRAMAS

Colour Out of Space, The – [free download, The Colour Out of Space] West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs…

Cool Air – [free download, Cool Air by the new Suspense show] A struggling young writer befriends a Spanish physician afflicted with a most unusual ailment- an aversion to heat. Adapted from the short story by H.P. Lovecraft.

Outsider, The – [free download: The Outsider] I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Outsider. The Black Mass did it as an audio drama (not simply reading the story, but with sound effects, etc.) in the 1960s, and it is fantastic. Even if you’ve read the story, this version has an added dimension that you’ll enjoy.

Pickman’s Model – [free download, Pickman’s Model] An audio drama based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft.

Doctor WHO: The Starship of Madness – [free download, Doctor Who and the Starship of Madness] Doctor Who meets H.P. Lovecraft! It’s an audio drama, but it shows the video of the actors. That’s cool and all, but you’ll enjoy the story a lot more if you just listen to it without watching it.

Fire of Asshurbanipal, The – [free download, The Fire of Asshurbanipal by the new Suspense show] Two soldiers of fortune, marooned deep in the deserts of Turkestan, discover a city of legend – and the ancient, unspeakable evil it houses. Adapted from the short story by Robert E. Howard.

Graveyard Rats, The – [free download, The Graveyard Rats by the new Suspense show] Unscrupulous New England body snatchers are determined to obtain a corpse – no matter where they have to go in the pursuit. Adapted from the short story by Henry Kuttner.

Horla, The – [free download: The Horla] Based on a 1887 short horror story written in the style of a journal by French writer Guy de Maupassant, and cited by some as a possible inspiration for Cthulhu. This audio drama was done by The CBS Radio Mystery Theater in 1974.

Hounds of Tindalos, The – [free download, The Hounds of Tindalos by the new Suspense show] A researcher uses a mystical drug to travel backwards through time. But what he finds there is a horror beyond imagining. Adapted from the short story by Frank Belknap Long.

Pipes of Tcho Ktlan, The – [free download, The Pipes of Tcho Ktlan by the new Suspense show] A two-timing, larcenous 1940’s swing band leader steals a forbidden Far East melody and uses it as the basis for a hit song – only to learn just why it is forbidden.

Return of the Sorcerer, The – [free download, The Return of the Sorcerer by the new Suspense show] A scholar is hired by a practitioner of the dark arts to decipher a very special passage from the dread Necronomicon… Adapted from the short story by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Thing, AKA Who Goes There? – [free download: The Thing, AKA Who Goes There?] An audio drama version of The Thing, a story with several Lovecraftian themes.

When the Stars are Right – [free download: When the Stars are Right: part one – part two] Lovecraftian story by William Meikle. Scientists have found a new source of energy – but why do they need a priest and a medieval historian?

Who Goes There? – [free download, Who Goes There? by the new Suspense show] An Antarctic research expedition finds something frozen deep in the ice cap…something that is still alive. Adapted from the short story by John Campbell.

Supernatural Horror in Literature – [free download: part one – part two – part three – part four] Supernatural Horror in Literature is a long essay by the celebrated horror writer H. P. Lovecraft surveying the field of horror fiction.

The Young Man of Providence – [free download: The Young Man of Providence] Biographical narration by Hugh Burden, quotes from Lovecraft’s letters by David March (as if spoken by Lovecraft), and excerpts from Lovecraft’s stories.

17 responses to “Lovecraftian Audios”

I downloaded some of your Lovecraft audio files and “The Haunter In The Dark” is only half there. It fades out in the middle of the story. Years ago I think I had this on cassette tape and this is only side one. I was looking forward to hearing it again. Kind of a letdown. I hope you can find side two.

Hi there, Larry. I’ve download this twice, and been able to listen to the entire story. It does seem a little weird because it shows as only being about 28 minutes long… but then it continues after that 28 minutes. Keep it plying, and see if it comes back on. Has anyone else had a problem?

I downloaded it again and opened it in Sony Sound Forge. It is only 28:00 minutes. The recording, as it is here, ends with him running out of the tower and the church. The Haunter in the Dark goes on for quite a bit longer.

The entire tape does play in itunes but if I put it on my mp3 player it only plays the first half. It does say 28 minutes in itunes and then plays for nearly an hour. If I view the wave form in any audio editor it shows and plays only the first 28 minutes. Very strange! Must be something Lovecraftian

What a fantastic–and I use that word purposefully–thing you are doing here. Thanks so much. I am already a fan of radio drama, and your collection enriches my collection so much.
With deepest regards, Rev. V

This brings back fond memories for me. I worked the graveyard shift at a university radio station (during the worst winter in New York history, lol), the combination of which would have been mind-numbingly boring, but the audio library there was full of treasure. I was allowed to broadcast several hours of everything from INNER SANCTUM to THE CBS MYSTERY THEATRE. I wish I had had some of these Lovecraftian treats back then, I would have really creeped out some of the snowbound midnight listeners 🙂

why are so few of the mythos anthologies every released as audiobooks? Its a real shame. I have all the ones I can find. The two editions of ;The book of cthulhu’ were really great on audio but there are only a handful of others. I see more and more story collections being released and when I look for an audio version im almost always disappointed.

Id like to ask any of the editors who may read this to please think about producing audio versions of your titles

Click the image! Fateful words of Lovecraftian horror... in anapaestic tetrameter. The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers. H. P. Lovecraft’s classic short story, gloriously reimagined as a children’s book by R.J. Ivankovic. 102 pages, full color hardback. Available exclusively from Chaosium.com.

Click the image for details or to purchase! Awesome Cthulhu t-shirt designs, and much more! Reasonable prices. Click the image to browse!

Click the image for details! Major Arcana Tarot cards inspired by Lovecraft with the amazing art of Sara Bardi, and the new Cthulhu cult statuette for collectors.

Click the image for details! CTHULHU: Rise of the Cults - Strategy board game for 1-4 players. Lead your cult, celebrate rituals, crush the enemies, sow madness and please The Great Old Ones!

Click the image for details! New England and Lovecraftian tales! These stories range from "Watcher and Keeper". a tale with a Lovecraftian bent, about the real reason Lake Warren in East Alstead, New Hampshire, was created, to the title story which is an alternate history with a dark side.

Click the image for details! A shadowy world of occult rituals and unspeakable horrors, leading to a secret cabal operating at the highest levels—and a plot to summon the darkest of all powers, to bring forth an evil that does not belong in our world—to enact the Rites of Azathoth.

Click the image for details! A new landmark in underground Swedish horror, inspired by equal parts H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, and something far more disturbing: When her daughter is abducted by her ex-husband, a young mother will track the missing child and its father to a mysterious institution. But once inside, she will find herself trapped in a hallucinatory netherworld where reality turns amorphous, survival becomes parasitic, and an infested darkness lives and feeds in the light.

Click the image for details! Fans of the Mythos will find much to devour in this book and fans of horror, both psychological and abject, will find themselves drawn into Felix’s story and taken, kicking and screaming, along for the ride.

Click the image for details! Major Arcana Tarot cards inspired by Lovecraft with the amazing art of Sara Bardi, and the new Cthulhu cult statuette for collectors.

Click the image for details or to purchase! Embrace the darkness, the haunts of the shadows that surround you. Pull up your covers and enjoy a read. Let yourself drift into that other world; the place where the author controls your vision. See what he sees. Hear what he hears. Relish this collection of short dark fiction stories. -- "Fresh Cut Tales gives us originality and ambition. Solid combination from a writer to watch." ~ Mort Castle, Bram Stoker Award winning author of NEW MOON ON THE WATER

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